This course, which is designed to serve as the first course in the Recommender Systems specialization, introduces the concept of recommender systems, reviews several examples in detail, and leads you through non-personalized recommendation using summary statistics and product associations, basic stereotype-based or demographic recommendations, and content-based filtering recommendations.

Recommender systems have changed the way people find products, information, and even other people. They study patterns of behavior to know what someone will prefer from among a collection of things he has never experienced. The technology behind recommender systems has evolved over the past 20 years into a rich collection of tools that enable the practitioner or researcher to develop effective recommenders. We will study the most important of those tools, including how they work, how to use them, how to evaluate them, and their strengths and weaknesses in practice.